Trial by Ice and Fire

by Clinton McKinzie

  When I go back out, Cali is already in the kitchen. The sounds from the CD player appear to be having an effect on her, too—her prior irritability appears to have dissipated somewhat. She helps me with dinner. My elbows occasionally touch her upper arms as I chop broccoli and once she bumps me away from the sink with her hip. The intimacy is disconcerting, but pleasant. As we work together without speaking I think of good times with Rebecca. How cooking in the kitchen would often lead to us lying naked on the cold tile floor. A little voice in my head disrupts my reverie by wondering if we'll ever do that again.

  Sitting at the big table, we slurp our pasta. The only other noise is the music. Mungo watches us eat with wet eyes and drool spilling from her mouth but is too shy to beg. I try to avoid looking at Cali but she still manages to catch my eye.

  “Tell me something, Anton. Are you stringing me along?” Her green eyes bore into mine like she's trying to look past them. Through them, into my brain.

  I put down my fork and spoon. “No,” I say flatly. Then with less certainty but more honesty, “Yes. Shit, maybe.”

  Cali looks amused at my equivocation. I find it hard to hold her gaze but I force myself to do it.

  “What's going on with the girlfriend?”

  “She's coming up tomorrow. To dump me, I'm pretty sure. Things have been kind of rough lately. I don't know.”

  “If she's going to dump you, why doesn't she just call then? Or write a letter?”

  “That's not her style.”

  “So I'm the bench warmer, huh?” she asks with a small smile. “Second string?” And it hits me that I am stringing her along, keeping her ready and willing so that if Rebecca does finally cut our ties then I'll have somewhere to go for comfort. The realization makes me feel like an ass. I resolve to keep things more professional from now on.

  So instead of answering her question, I ask, “Tell me about Myron Armalli.”

  The smile fades away. “That guy,” she says with distaste. “He's a freak, a real loony. I prosecuted him about three months ago for dressing up corpses he was transporting for the coroner's office and taking pictures of them. Maybe doing more. Why do you ask?”

  “I was reading about him today. His files. Did you know Armalli had a prior for stalking a girl in high school? Right here in Teton County?”

  “No. It must have been a juvie case—this is the first I've heard of it. Where did you learn about that?”

  I don't mention taking the sealed files. Having already told her about my brother, she has more than enough information to get me in trouble if she wants to. Instead I ask, “Did he give you any weird vibes during the trial?”

  “Sure. But he gave everybody weird vibes. The guy's weird, really weird. He yelled in court—in front of the judge—about how I would regret taking away his liberties or something like that. A lot of other strange stuff, too. Are you thinking that he might be the guy? Not Wook?”

  “I'm starting to think there's a pretty good chance,” I admit.

  I'm still having a hard time with the fact that it's not Wook. Nothing would make me happier than to have him be the stalker, to link his wrists behind his back and put him in a cage. After all, I know he's following her around. I know he hates my guts. And what did he have in that gym bag this morning? But I resolve again to follow the evidence, not my impulses. I'm still carrying a cold spot in the center of my back from my afternoon visit to the old homestead.

  Cali tells me more about Armalli, and on my mental notepad I can see the evidence mounting. When he'd taken the witness stand he'd blabbed on and on about his “art” and his First Amendment right to make it. About how Hollywood and the modern art establishment were trying to stop him. Oppressing him. He apparently believed his greeting cards were revolutionary, that they would remove the boundaries between life and death, break down the barriers, or some bullshit like that. I think I can begin to see a little into the head of this young madman I've never met but whose presence I'd felt earlier in the afternoon. Does he think of his prosecutor—his persecutor—as a future piece of performance art? Hadn't Angela Hernandez with her master's in psych talked of the stalker maybe wanting to do something symbolic?

  “Did you ever talk to him alone?”

  “Just once. When we were in the courtroom before his attorney and the judge and jury came in. He said in a real quiet voice, not looking at me, that he'd known me when I was a kid. That was it. I ignored him when he said it, his attorney not being there and all.”

  “Did you know him?”

  She looks a little bit uneasy. “In the file I saw his address. He grew up practically next door to Mom's ranch. I remember sometimes seeing a kid in the woods by the meadow where I rode horses. A shy kid who never came out and said hello or anything. Now I think it might have been him. And it makes me feel bad, because I never made any effort to talk to him. I was a pretty self-involved little girl. Mom's influence, you know.”

  “Then, when he was on the witness stand, he said you were going to regret charging him?”

  “Yeah. That's what he said. I didn't think anything of it. I thought he meant because he was such a great artist or something like that.”

  I don't say anything.

  “You know what?” Cali asks, looking down at her hands. “I do regret it. Not talking to him when he was a kid. Ignoring him when he spoke to me in the courtroom. I should have reached out to him. He's a messed-up kid, that's all.”

  “One who's trying to kidnap you. And do who knows what after that.”

  There's nothing more to say about it. Wook's name is off my suspect list for the stalker. At least off the list for the guy who's trying to kidnap her. But I can't help feeling that although I've erased his name, I can still see it lingering faintly on the page in my head. I still believe that he's a danger. To both of us. What the hell did he have in that gym bag?

  After a few minutes' silence I ask her, “Are you going to put Wook on the witness stand tomorrow?”

  Cali sounds eager to talk about something else. “He'll be my second witness. First I want to put on the good cop, the guy who initially made the stop. I know everyone thinks I'm just taking this thing to trial to punish Wook—embarrass him for what he did—but I really want to win. I want to get this old guy off the streets for a while. But the defense will argue—or imply—that the jury should walk him because of the police misconduct.”

  I know that this bit of misdirection will probably be effective. The jury won't be told about the defendant's prior history of drunk driving and running over small children. Wook won't even be able to explain why he did what he did on the witness stand because it would be prejudicial to the defense. All the jury will know about is that he punched an old man for a relatively minor offense. Justice and criminal law are incidental, I remember McGee once telling me.

  “Are you going to play the tape?”

  “I've got to,” she says, as if there weren't any choice. And it's true that now that she's shown it to the defense attorney there is no other choice, but she never had to give it to the defense attorney in the first place. That was an uncommon act of bravery and integrity for a new prosecutor who will have to work with the local police. Especially when she was implicating her boyfriend in a crime that could cost him his career.

  After we eat, Cali puts Counting Crows on the stereo. This, too, is a good choice. I busy myself doing the dishes after she helps me carry them to the sink. The chair creaks when she sits back down at the table and begins flipping through the pages of her case file, reviewing witness statements and the law regarding the admissibility of Intoxilyzer results. I wash out the pot and scrub the dishes. Then I go upstairs and bring down from the loft the copy of Smoke Jump. This time Cali sees it in my hand.

  “Do you mind me reading this here?” I ask her. “I can go back upstairs.”

  She looks down at her legal pad and blows air out of her cheeks. “No. I have a copy of it, too, but I've never been able to read it. It's supposed to be a good book, all ab
out Dad and Bill and Mom and what happened on Elation Peak before I was born.”

  “From what I've read so far, they were pretty ballsy guys. Parachuting into forest fires and all that. Getting their kicks, but doing something with a real purpose, too. Your dad sounds like someone I would have liked to have known.”

  Cali nods a couple of times. She starts to say something then clears her throat. I wait, but she doesn't try to speak again. Instead she goes back to work. I lie on the couch and read.

  It's good book. Like Norman MacLean's Young Men and Fire, which is referred to many times, the author gives more than technical information about fire fighting and what went wrong on Elation Peak. He provides details about the men who do this for a poorly paid career, talking about their backgrounds, training, and the off-season hobbies that the job supports. Much of it centers on Bill Laughlin and Patrick Morrow, Cali's father, and much is made about their friendship. They'd known each other since childhood. Patrick had been handsome and sensitive, a terrific skier but not good enough to win races; Bill, a kind of good-natured bully and sometimes a practical joker who was addicted to putting up hard routes on alpine walls. Together they made an unlikely but extremely close pair.

  Salacious details and a complication in the friendship are added when young actress Alana Reese buys a ranch in the valley and meets Patrick and Bill one night in the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. Both men pursued her keenly, but after a time her affections were won by the skier rather than the climber. The author, citing Bill as his source, speculates that perhaps this was because Patrick's passion was more accessible to the actress. She could fly him off to a luxurious chalet in St. Moritz, but she couldn't sleep on an icy ledge with Bill. I remember Cali telling me in the bar about how Bill's always been in love with her mother. Again I have to push away thoughts about Rebecca.

  I'm just getting to the part where a fire is building outside Lander, Wyoming, when my phone rings. Jim's name is flashing on the screen.

  “What's up?” I ask.

  “Sorry, man. He got away from me.”

  “What happened?”

  Jim explains that he'd followed Wokowski to a house south of town earlier in the evening. The sergeant was inside for about fifteen minutes, then came out carrying a little boy in his arms. He put the boy in the front seat of the department SUV, then he and a woman—the boy's mother, probably—loaded a wheelchair in the back. They drove to a baseball field in town where a Little League game was being played and parked next to the field. The only time Wokowski got out of the car was to go and buy hot dogs and Cokes. “I thought they were there for the duration, man. So in the third inning I went to get myself something to eat. When I came back, they were gone.”

  “Did you go back to the boy's house?”

  “Yeah. Even peeked in the window—he'd brought the boy back then taken off. So I drove back over to Wook's place but his truck wasn't there either. So now I'm just cruising around, looking. According to the desk, he's supposed to go on duty at midnight. I'm sorry, man.”

  I can't really reprimand him although I'm tempted to. I'd done something far worse by leaving Cali unprotected when she went to the bathroom in the bar last night. Besides, Wook is no longer a suspect for the attempted kidnappings so it really doesn't matter. But I do want to know what he's up to. What his intentions are.

  “Okay. Keep looking. Come by out here and see if he's lurking around again tonight. Don't worry about it, though. He's not looking as good as he did this morning.”

  Jim promises to do just that. Right after I hit the END button another phone starts ringing. Cali, who's been watching me talk, gets up and takes her phone out of her bag.

  “Is it Wook?” I ask as she studies the screen.

  “No. It's Suzy Casey, the lawyer in the trial tomorrow.” Then she answers the phone by saying with a smile, “You aren't going to ask for a continuance now, are you, Suzy?”

  Her smile fades as she listens to the answer.

  “When did it happen?” A moment later, “Is he going to be all right?” Then finally, “Okay, of course I'll have no objection. You can tell the judge for me in the morning.”

  After she hangs up she smiles again, but there's a wrinkle running across her forehead. She closes the case file with finality and puts her legal pad on top of it. “Her client was drinking and fell down some stairs about a half hour ago. Broke his collarbone and his nose. A concussion, too, the doctor said. The trial's off for another week or two.”

  “Was anyone with him?”

  “No. He was at home, alone.” The wrinkle grows more pronounced. “But he managed to crawl to a phone before he passed out.”

  I go to the window and look out at the night. All I can see is my own distorted reflection in the glass. “Jim lost Wook about an hour ago.”

  Behind me Cali doesn't say anything. But I know that both of us are wondering just what the hell is going on.

  TWENTY

  A LITTLE LATER she goes into the bathroom and comes out wearing an unlikely pair of pajamas. They have cartoon cats all over them. I can't help but smile at her. She grins back and says, “I'm not the ‘Too Drunk to Fuck' girl tonight.” Then she heads for the bed in the gear room. “I'm going to try and forget about this thing with Wook and Armalli and my defendant and get some sleep. Let's go into the mountains in the morning, okay? I can take a day off since the trial's postponed, and I've got to get away from this shit. We can stop by my house and pick up my skis.”

  “That's more than fine with me.” I can wait until the afternoon to go looking for Armalli. And the desire to get a little air beneath my heels is almost a craving. Feed the Rat.

  She takes one last long look at me before she closes the door between the bedroom and the main room. There's no smile on her face now. Just a serious expression that's hard for me to read. It might be something close to pity. She shakes her head ever so slightly as she softly shuts the door.

  I pick up my cell phone again and call for Mungo to come with me out onto the porch. As soon as we step out into the night the wolf heads for the trees. The light from the front window casts a glow out over the hood of my truck and into the lane. In that light I can see Mungo's tail lift high before she disappears. For a minute I listen and watch intently, half afraid of and half wanting to hear the rumble of a Sheriff's Office SUV and see a sweep of lights coming up the lane. If I knew anything for sure I would feel a lot better.

  But the night is still.

  I do the deep-breathing thing Rebecca had taught me, filling my belly with air then expelling the carbon dioxide in a steady puff along with the bad thoughts in my head. The first thing that goes out is any thought of Cali, the sight of her in her cat pajamas and last night's taste of her lips and tongue. Then goes Armalli and what I suspect is intended to be a horror show of performance art, and then Wokowski and his unknown intentions. After that I exhale my brother and my worries about what's going to happen to him. Finally, the thought of a life without Rebecca goes out, too, but then I somehow manage to suck it back in. Like it's some sticky phlegm putting up a fight. A cough that just won't clear. After a few more deep blows I feel its grip lessening. Ten or twenty more and I'm dizzy, seeing stars that aren't there, but the notion is finally no more than the leftovers of a mild cold.

  “Hi,” I say when she picks up the phone. It's eleven at night, the time when Rebecca smokes the first of her three daily cigarettes before starting her best writing hours.

  “Hi, Ant.” She sounds almost normal. It makes my heart involuntarily swell with hope. From those two words I can tell that the distance between us has fallen away temporarily. Maybe, just maybe, this is all going to work out.

  “Are you coming up, 'Becca?”

  “I'm coming.” I pump a fist into the night sky and grit my teeth with determination. If I can just see her then I'll win her back. Woo her, beg her, whatever it takes. “For just a couple of days. I'm taking some sick time. I'll be in Jackson tomorrow night. Dad and I will leave Denver at about
ten, and according to MapQuest, we'll be in town by eight.”

  “Your dad's coming?”

  “It was his idea to come along. He wants to get out of town, too. He's been pretty stressed out lately.”

  Her father is a law professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I like and respect him but we've not been close. I can't figure out what it means, her wanting to bring him up when we have such a personal discussion planned. I know I'm not his idea of the perfect companion for his daughter. Afraid of hearing something I don't want to hear, something that will undermine my newfound confidence and determination, I restrain myself from asking more.

  “Will you stay with me? He can stay here, too.”

  “With you and your stalking victim, you mean? That place you rented doesn't sound all that big.” Her voice isn't mistrustful, the way it had been last night. There's a lightness in it now. The hard edge that started appearing about a month ago is apparently in remission tonight.

  “No, 'Becca. Just you and me. I'll put my vic somewhere else for the night if I need to. But I'm hoping to wrap this up anyway tomorrow afternoon. I'm pretty sure I know who he is and where he's hiding out.” This is more than optimistic, considering the new wrinkle with Wook and Cali's injured defendant. But still, I'm determined.

  “You'll be safe, won't you? None of that soloing BS, not in the mountains or when it comes to arresting bad guys, okay?”

  I want to laugh, it's so good to hear her talking this way. “Promise.”

  “Good. My dad's gotten us a condo at a place called Spring Creek Ranch. He's feeling pretty down—this week is the fifth anniversary of my stepmom's death, you know. I really feel like I ought to stay with him.”